On Wed, May 20, 2015 10:11 am, Arthur Maisel wrote:
> Michael Smith has a point. But that the trope was ready-to-hand doesn't
> preclude its application to a situation in which some of those thus labled
> literally were slaves. To ignore that the language preceded the situation
> is anachronistic; to notice that it might have been evoked because of the
> facts isn't.
Getting at a writer's intent is always a tricky business. But as a general canon of method, I'd suggest that a conventional locution should ordinarily be taken in its conventional sense unless there's some clear reason, apart from the reader's desire, to take it in some more specific or pointed way.
In this context it might be noted that Scott Key's lyric is almost stupefying bad, dull, tone-deaf, erratic in scansion, and so stuffed with cliche it resembles an overcooked Turducken. Conventional tropes were clearly the breath of life to this execrable provincial poetaster, for whom entertaining an original thought or using an original image would have been about as congenial as cuddling a water moccasin. One might suggest that he stands in the same relation to English Augustan verse as Marse Tom Jefferson does to English Palladianism.